Pink Fluorite

Item Description

Fluorite is a diversified species, found all over the world in a wide range of colors and styles. While Fluorite is found in truly every color of the rainbow, a lot of collectors will tell you the most desirable color is a strong pink (rarely red) hue, but there only a few places in the world where this particular shade of Fluorite is found. Most notably the finest pink/red fluorites ever found are those from the Swiss and French Alps in Europe. In August 2019, there was a discovery of some of the most significant pink/red Fluorite specimens at the Huanggang deposit, in Inner Mongolia, China. These specimens are certainly comparable to their Alpine counterparts, especially because they have the same habit and color, but in the case of the Chinese material, some of the crystals were incredibly gemmy and actually facet-grade. This beautiful small cabinet specimen is an excellent example of this material. It features a group of very sharp, well-formed, gemmy, beautiful pink color octahedral crystals, with no matrix. The piece is nearly a complete "floater", as it's crystallized all the way around, with only a few small points of attachment, where it was intergrown with either another Fluorite crystal at one point or the matrix. If you look closely, you'll see very thin acicular inclusions of a green mineral (either Hedenbergite or an Amphibole species) frozen inside some Fluorite crystals, and it's more concentrated in areas to the point where the crystals are nearly pure green. This combination of green and pink together is very appealing when the piece is backlit. The color looks good in incandescent light, but even better in sunlight. As a matter of fact, the intensity of the pink color varies quite a bit depending upon the temperature and style of light in which the piece is viewed, so your lighting might make the piece look either softer or more intense. A wonderful specimen of this now hard to find material, as these pink Fluorite crystals from Huanggang seem to have been mined out, and it's possible we may never see them again.
From the collection of Jason Adams, valued $5,000